Curator Chat

We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World

Exterior view of the Brooklyn Museum.

Stephanie Sparling Williams

Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238 www.brooklynmuseum.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I am looking forward to visiting Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now, curated by Akili Thommasino and on view at the Met. It’s wonderful to see the show receiving such excellent reviews. I have always been interested in learning more about how American artists working in the 19th and early 20th century drew inspiration from the African diaspora. Just as ancient Roman and Greek history and culture provided a rich catalyst for American art styles and movements, including neoclassicism, Black American artists in particular were also drawing on other ancient civilizations, like Egypt, in their work.

What are you reading?
Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, which is completely transforming how I see and understand the work of painters like Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
Days before we opened the Brooklyn Museum’s newly transformed American art galleries last October, we installed a dazzling technicolor area rug designed by Black American artist and designer, Anna Russell Jones. Fabricated specifically for this reinstallation from a small hand-painted swatch—one of dozens designed by Jones currently at the African American Museum in Philadelphia—the rug offers visitors a unique way to experience Jones’s underrecognized artistry. It was a powerful moment to see the full-scale piece for the first time during opening week. Witnessing that act of visual translation, with Jones’s work realized in this context nearly a century after its creation, was deeply moving.

What are you researching at the moment?
The reinstallation of the Brooklyn Museum’s American Art galleries required a major research push, as there were over 420 artworks included in the galleries—from the paintings of Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918), Kyohei Inukai (1886-1954) and Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948), to canvases by Hisako Hibi (1907-1991)—the collection’s first work by an Asian American woman— a drawing by Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923) and a sculpture by William Edmondson (1874-1951). Looking ahead, I’m excited to shift focus toward research on recent acquisitions, including new work by Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998), Florence Kent (1917-1989) and Emily Sargent (1857-1936).

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I would love to organize an exhibition of The Little Paris Group, which was a group of Black artists, founded by Loïs Mailou Jones and artist Céline Marie Tabary, working in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s. Laura Wheeler Waring is also long overdue for a solo exhibition, preferably one with a substantial catalogue.—